François Boucher

François Boucher was born into a family from a humble background in Rue de la Verrerie in Paris on 29 September 1703 and hardly ever left this neighbourhood on the right bank of the Seine, although he did make two trips in his lifetime, one to Italy and the other to the Low Countries. His godparents, like his mother Elisabeth Lemesle, were members of the «bourgeoisie de robe», in other words from a legal milieu, one of them being a bailiff charged with executing demands from the palace, the other the daughter of a public prosecutor at the Châtelet. The young painter’s first Parisian customers on his return from Rome in 1731 were also members of that class, whilst his father, master painter Nicholas Boucher, was probably alerted to his son’s talent at an early age, and it is to him that François owed his impeccable mastery of technique, although his first apprenticeship is likely to have taken place when he was about fourteen at the school of the Académie de St Luc, of which his father was a member.

Boucher grew up in a country at war, where the ageing Louis XIV’s court laboured beneath the weight of a stiff and formal etiquette. Following the King’s death, and with the regency of his nephew Philippe d’Orléans, Paris in 1715 became a vibrant hub of literary and artistic creativity and a financial centre of the first importance frequented by artists born around 1700, like François Boucher, who were to create and develop the styles known as “Rocaille” and “Louis XV”. Young Boucher’s temperament, mixing unbridled creative power with a certain difficulty in mastering detail, was untypical in this milieu. His good fortune, by comparison with his fellow pupils, was that he probably spent time in the workshop of the Venetian master Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini on a project for the Paris offices of the Banque de Mississipi, in the very neighbourhood in which he had grown up. This may explain the swirling creativity, his eccentric compositions, the vibrant silhouettes and the rich palette in his earliest known works. These long lost works from his earliest youth have been resurfacing under attributions to Italian painters – Venetian, more often than not – in recent years. In 1721, the artist embarked on his first official apprenticeship when he entered the workshop of François Lemoyne, the King’s painter, who instantly predicted that a great future awaited him when Boucher showed him his Judgment of Suzanne (Ottawa, The National Gallery of Canada). But François Lemoyne, who was extremely busy with his own commissions in Paris, did not succeed in bringing him to heel, and so a few months later, in 1722, we find him in a team put together by wealthy art connoisseur Jean de Jullienne to prepare publication of the Figures de Différents caractères, de Paysages, et d’Etudes dessinées d’après nature, par Antoine Watteau, a collection of engravings after drawings left by that recently deceased master at his death. Boucher earned particular distinction in this task, engraving “as though he was having fun” because “his light and spiritual manner seemed tailor-made for the task”, the celebrated collector Pierre-Jean Mariette was to write. Boucher’s skill resulted in his producing a majority of the plates in the two volumes, published in 1726 and 1728, and, his merit attracting recognition, he won the privilege of being tasked with designing the two frontispieces. This work after Watteau allowed him to build up a valuable repertoire of faces and attitudes and to train in a number of different techniques, including trois-crayons and counterproofing. It was at this time that he began to forge close bonds with his master’s entourage, certainly making the acquaintance of Pierre Crozat, Antoine de La Roque and Nicolas Vleughels, who was about to depart from Rome to take up his position as director of the Académie de France in the papal capital. Winning the Académie’s first prize at the age of twenty in 1723, Boucher should, theoretically, have been sent to Italy immediately thereafter, but for a number of political and financial reasons he ended up having to wait almost five years before going there. During that time, he may have frequented the workshop of Jean-Baptiste Vanloo and Jean-François de Troy circa 1725, painted his first mythological or religious pictures and his first genre scenes inspired by northern European art, and continued to work as an illustrator of books.

He finally embarked on the trip to Italy with Charles-André (Carle) Vanloo and his nephews Louis-Michel and François in the spring of 1728. In Rome, the young artists attended lessons at the Académie, drew the Renaissance masters, classical art and from nature, but they also had to earn their living because the funds owing to them failed to materialise. This prompted François Boucher to paint “precious little paintings in the Flemish manner” and to visit Naples, Florence, Milan, Venice and Ferrara, before returning to France. Back in Paris by the summer of 1731, he showed “certain of his drawings” to the members of the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture, who accepted them, and he was asked to submit a reception piece on the compulsory subject of Renaud et Armide dans les Plaisirs (Paris, Musée du Louvre) in order to become painter to the King. Thus, in the space of only ten years, the young artist succeeded, thanks largely to his self-taught training, in moving from the school bench to this prestigious post, which he was granted in 1734, before being appointed assistant professor and then professor at the Académie Royale de Peinture et Sculpture (1735–7). His friend Carle Vanloo, who returned from Italy several months after him with his young wife (a singer from Turin named Cristina Antonia Somis and the daughter of a pupil of Arcangelo Corelli), was a member of the close circle of the Prince de Carignan, the director of the Académie Royale de Musique. A few months after him, Boucher in his turn married a young girl from a family of musicians in the same Académie, who “sung like an angel” according to foreign diplomats who came to hear her sing, and who may have been a member of Cristina Somis’s circle in Paris. In any event, she introduced Boucher into the world of music, which led him to work with such great composers as Jean-Philippe Rameau, Jean Féry-Rebel and Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville.

At that time, having recently been appointed painter to the King, he was asked by the manufactory of Beauvais to create new cartoons for its tapestries, by the composer Jean-Philippe Rameau to produce the sets for his opera-cum-ballet Les Indes Galantes and by the Bâtiments du Roi for an initial order of four Virtues in grisaille for the chamber of Queen Marie Leszczyńska in Versailles (which still hang there today). Louis XV later commissioned him to paint exotic hunting scenes for Versailles, and it was also for the King, but in Fontainebleau, that he produced his first pastoral scenes inspired by fables, by the theatre or by novels, set in idyllic landscapes, marking the birth of Boucher’s pastorals. Despite his numerous mythological and religious paintings, it is with his pastorals that he achieved the greatest popularity and they were still in great demand throughout France and Europe right up to his death in 1770.

A tireless creator, Boucher gave his era a complete decor, supplying cartoons for tapestries to the manufactory of Beauvais and then to the Gobelins, whose inspector general he became, creating fountains, designing screens, clocks and statues, painting large historical subjects and pretty genre scenes, inventing sophisticated chinoiseries, devising models of children in biscuit porcelain for the manufactories of Vincennes and Sèvres, supplying sets for the theatre and the opera, closely supervising the work of his engravers in completely new techniques imitating drawing, addressing serene and serious religious subjects on behalf of the King ‘s favourite, Madame de Pompadour, and inventing for the favourite’s brother that Resting Girl lying naked on her belly which the 19th century, following in Diderot’s footsteps, so utterly deplored. The painter’s meeting with the favourite in 1745 marked an important turning point in his life. He painted nine portraits of her in all, while also designing statues for her park, illustrating her breviary, decorating the palace she occupied and painting such masterpieces as The Rising of the Sun and The Setting of the Sun (now in the Wallace Collection) for the King’s appartments in her Château of Bellevue.

One final triumph, the title of First Painter awarded to him on 23 August 1765, crowned the brilliant career of an artist now aged sixty-one, whose elevation to such an exalted position no one could have foreseen. Laden with honours, the First Painter was worn down by the importance of the tasks heaped upon him and of the offices he held. Even though he still responded in the last five years of his life to requests coming in from all over Europe, he preferred, according to his contemporaries, to devote his energy and the time remaining to him to unstintingly expanding his exceptional collection of works of art, the true passion of his entire lifetime. That collection was to be dispersed early in 1771, only months after he died in his splendid appartment in the Palais du Louvre on 31 May 1770.